1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to computer aided instruction and in particular to a system and method for delivery, authoring, and management of courseware over a computer network.
2. Description of the Related Art
Hitherto Computer Aided Instruction (CAI) has followed two approaches, which may be labelled "the mainframe approach" and "the diskette delivery approach", respectively. Inherent to both are certain problems which make them unattractive for authoring and maintenance of educational materials, e.g., course authoring, course maintenance and course management.
In "the mainframe approach" of CAI the computerized course is a computer program stored and executed on a mainframe computer. This approach requires that each student of a particular course has access to the computer on which the program corresponding to the course resides. However, in many organizations it is not possible for all potential students to have access to a particular mainframe. Another limitation of the "mainframe approach" is that downtime affects all users. Furthermore, if the mainframe computer used for many concurrent tasks, e.g., many students taking many courses simultaneously or the CAI running in parallel with other tasks, then the responsiveness is often impaired. This aspect of "the mainframe approach" negatively effects the quality of the interaction between the courseware and the students.
In the "diskette delivery" approach, courses are delivered on a diskette and are executed by the student on his or her personal workstation. A problem with this approach is that the education administrator loses control over the course. For example, the original recipient of the course diskette may make a copy of the course and give this copy to a colleague without notifying the course administrator. Moreover, the course administrator is unable to monitor student progress and verifying that a student who enrolls in a course actually takes and eventually completes the course.
Losing control over the diskette also results in the course administrator losing control over which version of a course a student is taking. For example, if the student who originally obtains a given course, after finishing it, passes it on to a colleague and in the meantime a new update or a corrected course is released, the colleague would be taking an obsolete version. In case there are problems, e.g., bugs, in the software which constitutes a course, not being able to control which versions are actually used is a serious problem.
Another aspect of computerized training is help facilities, which provide a documentation support to computer programs. These facilities feature a "current screen" oriented user interface. The problems with this approach to training is that a user must both know that he or she has a problem and must know where to look for documentation on the problem.
Furthermore, such systems are limited to being help facilities as opposed to providing user training. Prior art training systems are stand alone programs, which are separate from the application programs to which they provide training. These systems require the user to leave the application program in order to enter the training sequence.
Another problem with prior art training systems is that there is no correlation between the mistakes a user makes in operating a system and the training provided to the user. It is required of the user to know when he or she is making a mistake, and upon realizing a mistake is being made, the user must know where to look for training materials.
Accordingly, improvements which overcome any or all of these problems with existing Computer Aided Training systems are presently desirable.